Software applications are ubiquitous in modern business. Such software applications are often designed to be flexible so that business users may customize them to their own particular needs.
Often, the specific customization required varies throughout an organization, and may vary over time even within one organization as the organization uses the software. For example, software may be installed to provide one or more report formats, but a business entity may decide that other formats are needed after some time. Error messages can be fixed at the time of software installation, but as the organization discovers other potential error conditions, the need may arise to be able to easily alter the error conditions. Generally, software applications may require one or more parameters than they need to be altered. The manner, frequency, and specifics of how the software will need to be altered and customized is often unknown at the time of installation.
Many times it is required to take the software application out of service in order to update these parameters. In situations where the parameters are hard coded into the software, this requirement mandates that the application be taken out of service. Moreover, if the software is running on a server with other applications, or is otherwise intertwined with such other applications, they may have to be taken off line also. For mission critical software, this presents a problem for an organization.
Even when parameters used by the software application are not hard coded, if such parameters are placed in a flat file on an application server where the software application is running, the software application may still need to be taken out of service in order to update the parameters.
Adding to the problem is that there is always a need to maximize the speed at which such software applications execute. This is particularly true in a multiuser environment, where many users are accessing a single application server. In such an environment, in order to maximize the speed and thus minimize response time of the software application, it is beneficial to have the needed parameters either hard coded into the software or stored locally on a flat file in the computer's memory. This allows the fastest access to such parameters, and thus, most efficient execution of the software. However, intertwining these parameters so closely with the actual application also operates against the idea of providing flexibility so that such parameters can be altered as needed without taking the system out of service.
Thus, the need to provide flexibility operates against the requirement that the parameters be available as quickly as possible to the software application. Specifically, the more intertwined the parameters needed by the software are with the actual software code (e.g., hard coded), the more difficult it is to alter the parameters without taking down the system, and thus, the less flexible the software system is. Generally however, the less intertwined the parameters are with the software application, the more easily they can be altered as needed.
In view of the foregoing competing requirements, there exists a need in the art to optimize software concurrently both in terms of its flexibility to permit alterations of parameters without taking the system out of service for an extended length of time, and also to provide type intertwining of the parameters needed with the actual software, in order to maximize speed at minimize response time. To date, there exists no known method of properly balancing these requirements.